As a self-proclaimed former supporter of localization and the efforts to offer alternatives to corporate globalization, Monbiot's sudden reversal is unsettling. Where is the debate, where is the well thought out constructive criticism? Localization is many things. Besides a sensible economic program it is a new paradigm, a viewpoint shared around the globe and an inspiring program for the fight against empire and corporate globalization. Why? Because it restores democracy, breaks the power of the oligarchs and gives people the strength to fight against poor odds and the violence of US-backed fascist regimes.

Monbiot thinks that GW Bush is about to destroy the WTO. I wrote the same thing back in 2001 when it was obvious that Bush was willing to sacrifice the US-created WTO in order to win a few rightwing senators to the US Congress, "US Farm Bill makes Bush look like a WTO Protester or as the Economist puts it The 'great anti-globalizer'." (From my article on localization economics, "A World of Possibilities" http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/article/2002/idels4.html).

The mistake Monbiot makes is to assume that the destruction of the WTO is a bad thing. The continuing and accelerating withdrawal of the US from all international institutions and its arrogant dismissal of protesters and the world's billions of poor people is a media message that only helps the forces arrayed against Empire. Monbiot says that: "The only thing worse than a world with the wrong international trade rules is a world with no trade rules at all." He knows better, there have always been and will always be trade rules. Since 1945 the world worked as well as it could under a capitalist system with trade agreements between individual countries. If the US or the protesters destroy the WTO it will be a great victory for the world and the future, especially if we (protesters and localization adherents) take advantage of the resulting vacuum to present an alternative program in a unified and coherent way. Monbiot ignores the EU and the efforts it will make to fill the vacuum or compete for trade deals with the US. Monbiot exposes his biases toward reformist illusions by demanding we push for a fair trade WTO! His position stinks of the Oxfam, Soros, Goldstein taint that seems to have taken over most of the anti-globalization moderates (ATTACK, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader, Dick Gephardt, Global Exchange?)

He makes an excellent point that the main problem for the future of the world is that: "we have hesitated to describe precisely what we want. We have called for fair trade, but have failed, as a body, to specify how free that trade should be, and how it should be regulated." He then launches into a narrow-minded and inaccurate attack on localization economic policies. "Localisation insists that everything which can be produced locally should be produced locally. All nations should protect their economies by means of trade taxes and legal barriers." True this is a longterm goal of localization and the only known path to social, economic and ecological sustainability, but it not something demanded immediately of all countries without mutual support and aid. Localization is a reorientation of socio-economic priorities and a direction for countries to follow as they develop. For Monbiot to state categorically that localization is "as coercive, destructive and unjust as any of the schemes George Bush is cooking up," is to possibly surpass the destructive side of this same GW Bush.

Monbiot claims to have seen the light when he heard a speaker (no reference or context given?) demand an end to most forms of trade and at the same time condemn trade sanctions against Iraq. Monbiot is purposefully or ignorantly confusing the long term goals of localization with the short term emergency that some countries who are trapped in the trade rat-race have found themselves in. I think the trade embargo against Cuba has been a wonderful thing, both because it has unified the Cuban people and led them to experiments with organic farming and import substitution that will help the whole world in the difficult transition to localization principles. Of course I feel for the Cuban people and have fought to stop the covert and overt terrorism inflicted on their experiment by the US CIA and its Miami-Cuban hired guns (Juan Bosch, Otto Reich, et al) Monbiot's declaration that trade is the ONLY possible means of redistributing wealth in the world is absurd and wrong. He asks for an alternative source and I give him revolution and land and asset redistribution! Utopian or naive? Possibly, but these are things that billions of people can relate to and fight for.

Monbiot makes a host of mistakes that I witnessed in grad school studying economics: static analysis. He doesn't grasp that as the world moves away from trade, waste and growth, that the value of raw materials will increase because the power of the US and its multinational corporations will be broken and slave wages and coercion will not play so heavily. I almost laughed when he said that localization would destroy small farmers which are the basis of localization. One of the big problems with Monbiot's tirade is that he only attacks Collin Hines [1 footnote] and the UK Green Party, who are not very significant actors in the localization debate (a straw man?). What about Helena Norberg-Hodge, Wendell Berry, Ecosolidarity Andes, COLACOT, Vandana Shiva, Walden Bello, the Via Campesina, David Korten, the Brazilian MST and Hugo Chavez? Selective memory George or poor scholarship? Can we all get in on the debate or is the world's future to be decided by two Brits?

Why don't we bring Paul Hawken and Dennis Kucinich (the next US President) into the debate? Hawken who I roundly condemned in January 2000 for his naive statements: "the [Seattle Anti-WTO] activists are not against trade," (Whole Earth, Spring 2000, p, 29,34,35) this over-simplification leads to a big lie because the media doesn't dig deeper and ask the hard questions. Most people have forgotten how to think things through. There were thousands or people in the streets of Seattle who supported the anarchists and the black-blocks not the "tinniest sliver of demonstrators," as Hawken implies (p.33).

Hawken tells a good story (Spider Woman N30), but the two most important issues are handled poorly. He switches back and forth talking about WTO and then about globalization. Globalization has been the economic system of increasingly "free" trade that we have lived under for at least forty years. WTO is just the final crowning ceremony of global corporate tyranny. The article makes a lot more sense if you substitute the words USA or trade wherever Hawken uses WTO. "Even if we abolished the WTO, GATT, IMF and World Bank once the global economic system recovered from the shock and possibly a collapse, we would have just about the same world we have now. That would not be progress that would be the status quo." [2 footnote] Hawken continues to waffle with statements like: "Trade is great. Trade is civilizing. Trade is not the issue" [!] But he has come along ways toward understanding the radical anti-WTO protesters: "We will in our lifetime convict corporations of crimes against humanity. We know how to transform this world, reduce our impact on nature and feed, clothe and house every person on earth. What we don't know is how to remove those in power, those whose ignorance of biology is matched by their indifference to human suffering. The environmental movement must become a civil rights movement, a human rights movement. and defend the right to culture, community and self-sufficiency." (Utne Reader, May-June 2003, p. 53) [3 footnote]

I have plenty of problems with what I perceive as the political naiveté and fixation on the First World found in Collin Hines writings and I don't think he is right to criticize Monbiot when Hines wrote in his rebuttal: "Monbiot wants the poor countries to be allowed to protect and diversify their economies, while we in the rich countries are to get rid of border controls, so that the poor exporters flourish." I think this idea of Monbiot's is quite admirable even if it too is naive or overly utopian. We need a global revolution of ideas, action and demands - not a few unachievable moderate reforms. We need to inspire and incite mass awareness and participation not toss a few grand top-down ideas around in elitist magazines and web sites that almost no one in the Third World can read.

"A still greater contradiction is this: that economic localisation relies entirely upon enhanced political globalization." Baloney and three boos to poor comprehension abilities. It is true that many of us have recommended scrapping the WTO, IMF, World Bank, FTAA and their ilk and replacing them with a few new international bodies to assist localization and sustainable development, but localization is not dependent on such bodies. Venezuela is on its way without any help (though OPEC, Cuba and Brazil are offering help of various kinds), parts of Brazil have followed suit and many groups around Buenos Aires are also experimenting with localization and community and solidarity-based development. [4 footnote] Interestingly Monbiot suggests import substitution and infant industry protections as an alternative to localization and yet these suggestions are a part of most localization programs. Besides, the program Monbiot promotes also requires enhanced political globalization!

Another glaring error is found when Monbiot says: "states would be forbidden", for example, to "pass laws ... that diminish local control of industry and services". Hines, in other words, prohibits precisely the kind of political autonomy he claims to promote. Bad thinking here as localization advocates want to increase local and regional political and economic autonomy and not necessarily the autonomy of nation-states, though any system would probably grant more autonomy to nation-states compared to the serfdom of the US Empire.

I do like Monbiot's suggestion of a fair trade license that corporations would have to get in order to engage in trade and I think this should be a reasonable part of a comprehensive plan for a transition to global localization. It would also be a valid excuse to seize the assets of corporations who resist re-licensing. His suggestion that "corporations pay the full environmental cost of the fossil it used," is an idea that Ecosolidarity has long proposed. Of course such a policy would eliminate most trade and most corporations because the final costs would be very high. I value Monbiot's efforts to understand the challenges we face and I implore him to do promote a real and open debate on the subject - and soon, since the WTO Cancun meeting in September is imminent and a comprehensive new economic proposal must be on the table by then. I all sincerity I beg Monbiot to take some time off for this issue, do some more reading or find a mentor who is well-versed on economics. For a beginners guide to economics and localization I would recommend my own work, "A WORLD OF POSSIBLE TRANSITIONS" http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/article/2002/idels6.html).

"America's assertions of independence from the rest of the world force the rest of the world to assert its independence from America. They permit the people of the weaker nations to contemplate the global democratic revolution that is long overdue" - George Monbiot, from his book The Age of Consent, 2003, www.commondreams.org/views03/0225-06.htm.

– Marcel Idels

Footnotes: [the rest of this article follows: ] Secondly, Hawken misleads people about radical viewpoints by his slant against anarchists. Editors should delete misleading opinionating or provide counterpoint. The same type of lies have been perpetrated by the Sierra Club and other green groups when they teach that we can have a greener and nicer economy with no loss in jobs or income - no suffering. So many young people have swallowed this along with the false benefits of recycling, organic foods and hemp/alternative energy. Radical change and truth get magically transformed into fads and lifestyle changes. No one thinks things through, the media provides half-truths and the important question of how we will get to a better world rarely gets discussed. In Whole Earth Spring 2000, at least sixteen writers discuss trade and WTO without addressing any of the key, root, or radical issues. The rest of the alternative media is no better. In the Nation, William Greider admits that Americans are once again participating in an economic system (even without WTO) that is half free, half unfree," (January 31, 2000, p.16). He adds that "poverty enslaves lives" as do "precapitalist feudal systems in many countries" and other "social hierarchies." Yet he suggests only stiffer reporting of overseas corporate operations, a few laws and modest reforms. Why doesn't he try to answer his own questions? "The movement must also invent what ought to replace [WTO] in the future - a positive story about what the world will look like if our values prevail" (Whole Earth p. 41). Instead of addressing these critical issues, Greider complains that the mainstream media portrayed Seattle protesters as "Luddite Wackos." We like that label and so would Thoreau, Gandhi, E.F. Schumacher, the Diggers and perhaps War Chief Crazy Horse. The only news articles that have given anarchists fair coverage were in the Slingshot Special WTO Edition, The Earth First! Journal (December and March issues) and Arcata, California's Steelhead Special (Spring 2000). If WTO/Globalization makes sense then we must be insane. We want to hear more about localization and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva. "Why should we [the poor] subsidize profits. People are saying this is not freedom. Market freedom is not people freedom. There is no other philosophy than Gandhi's that can get us out of our current crisis - governments have been hijacked by lobbies of the corporate world - governments no longer listen to the people, only to those who gave them kickbacks. I think Gandhi got it right. You need just one greedy person on this planet, just one. Just one corporation with limitless appetite could tear this planet down (Vandana Shiva in Jerry Brown's book Dialogues). Education has failed and so has democracy. Gandhi was against trade, against most technology. He was for "enoughness." Adbusters Magazine expressed the absurd reality of globalization and Market Totalitarianism with its reprint of a photo showing emaciated African children peering out at the modern world - at their fast approaching death, as stock market ticker-tape images scroll down their faces - like tears from a robber baron crocodile (Autumn 1999, p.60,see also Winter 2000 p.64). Bill Gates and a few people at Microsoft make more money than the poorest 500 million people in the world. Three people make more than the poorest forty-six nations combined. Why are we debating the WTO or globalization when even the greenest reforms would perpetuate most of the current extremes of poverty and eventual ecological collapse? The Underground and people all over the world are fighting to end all industrialization. The movement for real change is weak and divided because of poor education by activists and the media. WTO debates become like the Monica Lewinsky scandal. People hear surface discussions that don't teach us to think things through and to question whether our tactics fit our strategy or even whether our strategy makes sense. We are at the crux of a turning point in our lives and the fate of this planet. The Showdown in D.C. can be the beginning or the end of our chances for a hopeful revolution. Hope will grow only if we state clearly what kind of world we want and how we will get there. Opposed to the world of WTO and trade-based economics and against the allures of modernity, the Underground states its assumptions: "There is no such thing as green capitalism. This is why I believe that serious ecologists must be revolutionaries. Leftist ideologies speak only about redistributing the spoils of raping the Earth more evenly among the classes of humans. They do not address the relationship of the society to the Earth.In the context of today's industrial society, biocentrism (Deep Ecology) is profoundly revolutionary, challenging the system to its core. I could envision a form of socialism that would not destroy the Earth. But it would be unlike Marx's industrial model. If workers really had control of the factories, they would start by smashing the machines and finding a more human way to decide what we need and how to produce it. To the credo 'Production for Use, Not for Profit, Ecological Socialism would add 'Production for Need not for Greed.'" (Revolutionary Ecology by Judi Bari of Earth First!). Seattle showed the promise of what mass civil-disobedience - a la Gandhi - could have been if activists and the media had been doing better education. But it is way too late now for an easy nonviolent revolution. We have let things go too far and the police state behavior of the thousands of robo-cops in Seattle and D.C. is but a minor illustration of our dilemma. It is up to the anarchists and other revolutionaries to go beyond window smashing and make a big enough noise with a clear and powerful message of insurrection. The moderates need us more than we need them. We can work together, but we demand more honesty and better thinking through of our goals and our weaknesses. Many people have given up on activism and gone back to the shopping malls. Many youth have forever given up on peaceful change and demand direct action now. Vague notions of 'progress' and 'the good', combined with fantasies of a better world through technology keep most people from understanding the nature of the problem or the solution. The misrepresentation of Gandhi and of nonviolence damages the credibility and the power of mass movements. Gandhi believed that wealth amid poverty was the highest form of violence. He believed that when you cannot do nonviolence correctly, it is better to do violence than to do nothing. It would take a million dead nonviolent protesters to accomplish radical change. This is more US citizens than have died in all the wars we have fought, though many less than have died in India's quest for liberation. Too much patience or too much pacifism and there would still be a monumental pile of tea piling up in Boston harbor. People aren't perfect. The world will never be a peaceful "Be-Here-Now" Garden of Eden until we all honor and respect Solidarity, Ecology and Local Power. "The means are the ends," or "violence can never create a peaceful world," are the classic lies of those who would confuse us about the reality of our struggle. Pacifists and most of you who live in fear never really say what your "ends" or your goals are. If your goal is to wait for a perfect world while this world burns then you should explain your strategy for change better. Our goal is to bring down a monstrous corporate tyranny that is polluting, consuming and torturing billions of people and billions of species. We have a lot of ghosts to overcome but the main target is Reagonomics which haunts the world in Neo-Liberal stealth clothing. Ten million USA millionaires cheer on capitalism's Casino of the Earth. This is a world where you can't tell the genetically modified "carrots" from the IMF's stealth "sticks." Think local, act global. We need to care enough about a locality to join with others to defeat global corporate threats. Local-Global, its all got to be the same - a new economics has to work for everyone. The Program of Revolutionary Ecology: We draw inspiration and understanding from Judi Bari's critique of Capitalism and her suggestions for Ecological Socialism. "Production for Need" fits well with Gandhi's "enoughness." Decentralization is the structure of a Revolutionary Ecology political-economy. Self-Reliance and decentralization reflect Gandhi's prioritization of "Self-rule," that we should be governed by our own rules in our communities, then in our cities, then in our states. You can't be a member of a global village if you have been denied membership in your own village. Gandhi's concept of Swadeshi is another aspect of self-sufficiency and egalitarianism: Make the things you use and wear with your own skills, knowledge and local resources, and thus, to minimize waste and increase the meaning and relevance of each person. There will be little trade following the collapse of the world economic system and the death of Empire. Communities will have to carefully rely on local materials, simple technologies and sharing the pain along with everything else. Basic needs can be met and organic food production will be the priority. People will have to continue the revolutionary program of destroying complex technologies - wherever they are found. There will be many problems due to our cultural programming and our loss of useful skills. Our greatest challenge will be to hold on to our Love and our goal, which is a world of direct democracy, ecological reverence and free expression of our creative desires. [Clamor and the Earth First! Journal promised to run this article, but reneged. A version of it appeared in several radical zines.] [The following rebuttals or comments on Monbiot's article are found at Rethink on global trade Thursday June 26, 2003 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,985055,00.html Flattered as I am to be named three times in George Monbiot's regrettable conversion to the idea that more global trade will help the poor (Comment, June 24), I must put him right about the misconceptions he has about my book Localisation - a Global Manifesto. He is a one-sided protectionist. He wants the poor countries to be allowed to protect and diversify their economies, while we in the rich countries are to get rid of border controls, so that the poor exporters flourish. Localisation, he implies, will condemn poor countries to being producers of cheap primary goods rather than reaping the profits that processing will allow them to achieve. But he is silent on the devastating effects on third world exporters of south-south competition for these open markets of the north that he prioritises: China is an increasing threat to competing third-world exporters in a range of areas, for example, to India's software exports and Sri Lankan organic tea production. He also fails to address the fact that depending on others' markets outside developing countries' borders, and therefore outside their control, is unlikely to provide a secure future or a route from poverty. Localisation, on the other hand, prioritises increased self-reliance to increase community cohesion, reduce poverty and inequality, and improve livelihoods, social infrastructure and environmental protection. Localisation is not a return to overpowering state control, merely governments' provision of a framework that allows people to rediversify their own economies: the stuff, in fact, of Monbiot's normally excellent writings. - Colin Hines, East Twickenham, Middx So Monbiot realises that the WTO is needed, albeit in a different form. The problem is that he and his ilk have been screaming vengeance against it for years. Where's the guarantee that he won't revert to his former position as quickly as he appears to have abandoned it? Those of us who work in international finance and yet consider ourselves to be on the left were saying years ago that a supra-national framework would be needed to create the necessary conditions for fair trade, and that it appeared we had ready-made bodies in the IMF and the WTO. We were shouted down, not because our argument was flawed but because the radical left needed its corporate bête noirs to rail against. I congratulate Monbiot for seeing the point, and only hope that others pause in their drumming of the barricades long enough to see sense, too. - Thomas Tritton London As Tony Blair pours milk on to his cornflakes, he should stop and think about where his semi-skimmed comes from and where else it is going. Encouraged by the common agricultural policy, Europe's farmers produce rivers of milk that no one has the appetite for. Instead of pouring it down the sink, we dump our left-overs on the developing world, undermining local dairy farmers who cannot compete against our artificially cheaper milk. This is a crisis that Blair has shied away from. Today European agricultural ministers meet yet again to try and reform this £30bn CAP elephant. Europe's failure to get its agricultural policies into shape could well derail the world trade talks that begin in September. If Blair is serious about helping the poor, he must push for an agreement on agriculture before it is too late. So far, these negotiations have been a disaster for the poor, for small farmers, for the environment, for taxpayers, and for the credibility of the EU as a forward-looking institution. Justin Forsyth, Policy director, Oxfam [No Suggestions OXFAMers? Do you have a side? Are you still in favor of globalized free trade?] Even Paul Hawken - my least favorite moderate (though I think he may be learning a bit from my endless emails to him) now says that the environmental movement must become a civil rights movement, a human rights movement and defend the right to food, livelihood, the rights to culture, community and self-sufficiency: "Without that, it will simply be a failed white man's movement from the North. We know how to transform this world… what we don't know is how to remove those in power, those whose ignorance of biology is matched only by their indifference to human suffering. The way to save this earth is to focus on its people, and particularly those people who pay the highest price: women, children, communities of color, the localized poor." - Utne Reader "Clearing Your Head June 2003) Paul Hawken Resigns from Green Business Network over McDonald's Issue Open Letter from Paul Hawken to the Green Business Network Steering Committee Posted May 14, 2003 "Please let me take this moment to reflect on what a Green Business is and then submit my request to be taken off the Steering Committee." See the forthcoming paper by Ecosolidarity Andes: "Solidarity Plus Ecology Equals Local Power", available July 12, 2003

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